A storage system such as a storage cluster may perform a high availability procedure upon detection of a failure within the system. The storage cluster may perform one or more of the following procedures. The storage cluster may reconfigure itself, may redistribute responsibilities between live components/modules, may perform required clean-ups, as well as other related processing. After completion of the high availability procedures, the cluster may continue with IO processing in degraded or normal mode, depending on type of failure that triggered the high availability procedure.